1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer network environments. More specifically, the present invention relates to accessing electronic documents.
2. Description of Related Art
Information on the World Wide Web is typically made available by structuring the information into a visual presentation. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is used by the web author to define the visual structure. The end user is presented with this information by viewing the information on a computer display, after the information has been rendered into a visual format by a web browser (e.g. Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer).
Web pages are often created with various multimedia resources such as Video Clip, Audio, and Images. The web designer normally selects a primary format which will make the maximum impact on a normal user. Sometimes these multimedia formats may not be appropriate for users with various visual or hearing impairments.
Currently, well designed web pages use the HTML ALT tags to specify alternate resource formats for a multimedia resource. For example, a video clip may be specified as a primary format. The clip's text equivalent or audio version may be specified as the alternate format. Users, using the browser settings, may turn off the primary format and instead access the alternate format. However, the setting in a browser must be applied to the whole page, until the browser setting is changed.
Therefore, a more flexible approach for selecting alternate web page formats would be desirable.